Inverted question and exclamation marks
The inverted question mark ( ¿ ) and the inverted exclamation mark ( ¡ ) are punctuation marks used in the Spanish language . Question and exclamation sentences are introduced in Spanish with the reverse punctuation mark and end (as in German) with a question mark or exclamation mark . The rule can be found for the first time in the second edition of the Ortografía of the Real Academia de la Lengua , which appeared in 1754.
In the discussion at that time, the introduction was justified by the fact that, even with long sentences, one should know from the beginning whether they are questions or exclamations so that they can be emphasized accordingly while reading. This is also useful because in Spanish there is no difference in word order between propositional and interrogative sentences . Orally, the distinction can be recognized by the sentence melody .
| Form of statement | Question form | |
|---|---|---|
| German | You love Me. | Do you love me? |
| Spanish | Me amas. | ¿Me amas? |
Coding
"¡" And "¿" are defined in the ISO standard ISO-8859-1 and -15 and were taken over into the Unicode block Unicode block Latin-1, supplement .
| character | ISO 8859-15 | Unicode | HTML entity |
|---|---|---|---|
| ¡ | 0xA1 | U + 00A1 |
¡
|
| ¿ | 0xBF | U + 00BF |
¿
|
Web links
- Spelling of the question and exclamation marks on the Real Academia Española website (Spanish)
- Why Spanish is the only language with double question and exclamation marks ( British Broadcasting Corporation ) (Spanish)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Irene Hernández Velasco: Por qué el español es el único idioma que utiliza signos de interrogación (¿?) Y admiración (¡!) Dobles. BBC, September 25, 2017, accessed April 6, 2019 (Spanish).
- ↑ [...] hay periodos o cláusulas largas en que no basta la nota que se pone al fin y es necesario desde el principio indicar el sentido y tono interrogante con que debe leerse, [...] (quoted from footnote 1 ( BBC))